A commenter at the Daily Telegraph asks why Barack Obama was asked to buy a calculator for his 5th grade class in 1971:

As long as people are starting to read the book “Dreams From My Father,” take a gander where he describes his fifth grade school supplies list:

“… there was a list of things to buy — a uniform for physical education, scissors, a ruler, number two pencils, a calculator (optional).”

Barack Obama and I were born in the same year. The year he graduated from high school was the year I graduated from high school. A calculator for a fifth grader, or any K-12 student, in 1971? Highly unlikely. Yes they did exist, barely, from Wikipedia.

“The first truly pocket-sized electronic calculator was the Busicom LE-120A “HANDY”, which was marketed early in 1971. Made in Japan… The first American-made pocket-sized calculator, the Bowmar 901B (popularly referred to as The Bowmar Brain), measuring 5.2×3.0×1.5 in (131×77×37 mm), came out in the fall of 1971, with four functions and an eight-digit red LED display, for $240…”

It’s is a version of a question that has been posted around the Internet for some time. The exact context of the phrase can be read here, where an admirer of the president quotes the relevant passage in Dreams, in which the school asks 5th grader Barry to bring along a calculator to class:

I had gone for several interviews with Punahou’s admissions officer the previous summer. She was a brisk, efficient-looking woman who didn’t seem fazed that my feet barely reached the floor as she grilled me on my career goals. After the interview, the woman had sent Gramps and me on a tour of the campus, a complex that spread over several acres of lush green fields and shady trees, old masonry schoolhouses and modern structures of glass and steel. There were tennis courts, swimming pools, and photography studios. At one point, we fell behind the guide, and Gramps grabbed me by the arm.

“Hell, Bar,” he whispered, “this isn’t a school. This is heaven. You might just get me to go back to school with you.”

With my admission notice had come a thick packet of information that Toot set aside to pour over one Saturday afternoon. “Welcome to the Punahou family,” the letter announced. A locker had been assigned to me; I was enrolled in a meal plan unless a box was checked; there was a list of things to buy–a uniform for physical education, scissors, a ruler, number two pencils, a calculator (optional). Gramps spent the evening reading the entire school catalog, a thick book that listed my expected progression through the next seven years — the college prep courses, the extracurricular activities, the traditions of well-rounded excellence. With each new item, Gramps grew more and more animated; several times he got up, with his thumb saving his place, and headed toward the room where Toot was reading, his voice full of amazement: “Madelyn, get a load of this!”

The president did in fact attend Punahou in 1971. Since the literary goal of the the passage was to highlight the “wonderfulness” of his new school, the detail could simply be a mistake all too commonly found in writing: an anachronism. An anachronism is “a chronological inconsistency in some arrangement, especially a juxtaposition of person(s), events, objects, or customs from different periods of time. Often the item misplaced in time is an object, but it may be a verbal expression, a technology, a philosophical idea, a musical style, a material, a custom, or anything else associated with a particular period in time so that it is incorrect to place it outside its proper temporal domain.”

In other words, it’s like those arguments on the Internet where people discuss the “original video footage” of the sinking of the Titanic. It ignores the fact that nobody had an iPhone back then.

Now it is theoretically possible that the future president was, in fact, asked to bring a calculator to his 5th grade class in 1971. The Vintage Calculators site shows the four-function Sharp EL-8 available in 1970 and notes that it was “very expensive.” So while it is possible, it seems unlikely that even Punahou 5th graders were asked to bring that kind of stuff to class back then. The probable reason for the anachronism is that the author of Dreams misremembered something. It inserted itself into the memories associated with that time.

It is extremely hard to recreate a period exactly in fiction. Movies scenes are full of objects that shouldn’t be there. But fiction by definition was never intended to be factually accurate. Biographies, and especially autobiographies, are very vulnerable to this error, yet they are supposed to be fact.

My recently deceased brother-in-law was a biographer and understood this problem well. He would compile loose leaf binders of great length in order to create a factual timeline around which to hang the material gathered in interviews. This sometimes aroused the impatience of his publisher. But he argued it was necessary, because the timeline was the only solid hook on reality you have. It tells you who was where, and when. Memory, relied on by itself, was too uncertain.

A framework of facts is necessary because in the very literal sense we don’t really remember who we are. We make up our own self-image as we go along. The larger point of of Tim Stanley’s article in the Telegraph was not whether Barack Obama really ate a dog, but why the press never bothered to build up the framework of facts in which to understand the man. They took the candidate Obama’s account at face value. They never built up their timeline. Everything he said was true — even, perhaps, when it wasn’t.

But given the mainstream media’s intense study of Romney’s life and its constant regurgitation of its many errors, it’s odd that this shaggy dog story slipped through — especially given that Dreams from My Father has been gathering dust on the bookshelves since 1995. Where did it come from when it finally broke on Tuesday night? The Romney campaign and the conservative site Daily Caller. That’s right: Republicans have to break and publicise stories themselves if they want to get them heard. The mainstream media either ignores a lot of anti-Obama stuff or dismisses it as inconsequential.

But is it really inconsequential? Or is perhaps that they really didn’t really want to know? Memory plays tricks on us and we don’t question it much when it tells us we are wonderful. When it tell us something bad about our past, we’d rather forget it. In the movie Memento, the protagonist has no short-term memory so he writes things down, takes pictures, and tattoos himself to remember things. The way you preserve the unpleasant truth about your condition is to write it down.

Memory hold the door. But what might come in through that door should give us pause. Misremembered things are not always the autobiographer’s or biographer’s fault. But it is the duty of the “fact checkers” to set up the timeline, to check the collateral, to get at that most elusive of things, the truth. Did Barack Obama eat a dog? Did he bring a calculator to 5th grade in 1971? Who knows? Worse, who in the media really cared?

149 Comments, 149 Threads

1.
bartok

By early 1973, when I visited Miami, there was already a variety of calculators in the market — and the cheapest cost around U$ 70,00. For that amount one could spend 2 or 3 nights in a Hilton or Sheraton in NYC, meaning that in current values, that cheapest of calculators would cost today something around U$ 1.000,00. I doubt it, however, that they were easily available in Third World countries and, if they were, they would cost at least twice as much as in the US. Quite a lot of money.

My first calculator was an HP-35 and a fearsome expense it was. ( circa 1972 ) IIRC I paid $350.00. (!)

I still have my slip-stick. I STILL prefer the slide-rule for ratios / profit margin thinking.

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Toot = short-hand for Tutu — Hawaiian for grand-mother.

This is the gal with anger management issues I’ve posted of before.

She had tremendous ‘pull’ to get Barry into Punahou — the average American cannot imagine just how many applicants try to get through that door every year. It’s a stepping stone to the Ivies, Stanford, et. al. Essentially ALL of the elites in Honolulu have Punahou diplomas.

How did “pour over” get past The One’s editor? “Pore” is the intransitive verb, usuall used with “over,” in this context. This is what all that high-priced education produced? Tsk-tsk. Sorry, couldn’t resist picking the nit. Somebody’s gotta do it, right?

The HP’s initial cost, iirc, was about equal to one semester’s tuition at TAMU.

Why would you want 5th graders to use a calculator? Their young brains need to be inculcated with basic math skills. (+ – x /)

The left has a man with a sonorous voice, appealing demeanor who lies with such alacrity, offering false choices and jousting at fabricated strawmen. Why would they be interested in looking under the hood?

A friend of mine was an oil company exec and he had a TI calculator that did all of the trig/calculus functions in about 1972, it might have been 1971. It seemed to me that calculators were first designed to accommodate all the math functions that engineers, architects and other scientists would use to replace a slide rule, and only then did it follow that there was a craze of electric calculators (for the mass consumption) that were more or less electric adding machines (for accounting, for example). Does anyone else remember it that way?

It seems more and more there are statements made, even by the so called ‘learned’ that call into question things that are fundamental to one’s early memories and such is the disjointing of life’s experience one has to go back over it again and again to be certain that memory is correct.

I was browsing a book about material failure in a book store and came to a chapter on aviation which compared aircraft materials for fire hazard. Spitfires and Me109s were, apparently vulnerable to cannon because of their wooden construction and high fuel load. Of course being a teenager in the UK in the immediate post war years (and my father being a pilot) I was very familiar with the aircraft, but this was in 2005 and a world away. How could I have been so mistaken?

IOW, electronic engineers were designing electric calculators for their peers, and felt obliged that such a machine would only impress if it was capable of covering the spectrum of mathmatic calculations, otherwise done on paper with pencil, or the blackboard. Not thinking in marketing terms, they would not be so inclined to see the marketing potential of a simple electric adding machine for use in the household budget, for example. The whole narrative of Barry Davi’s’ life is risible, if, for nothing else, the sheer grandiosity of it’s many clear overstatements. They’ve kept the dam from bursting for so long, but, all they ever wanted was to get as many fingers in as many pies as they’ve got fangers in that damn dike of lies and balderdash. The whole thing is unraveling and the application of calculus will give you some idea of what it is like when a damn bursts, in algorithmic detail.

Blert, now I understand my low grades in geography: I assumed the place was in Indonesia. Anyway, HP calculators used to be among the most expensive and I remember being told in 1973 that one could get his/her Texas Instruments cientific calculator only about 3 months after ordering it. I only bought an HP when I entered college, and that was in 1977. At that time, in terms of status, owning an HP was above having one’s own car…

They are advocating more military co-operation with the Philippines but don’t seem to realize that US forces have down sized and the down sizing is accelerating. In another year we may not have enough forces to support all of our military commitments. To much money going for “green” energy and not enough for defense. People mock the UK’s down size but the US may soon be in an even worse situation.

In the fall of 1971, I was working as a clerk in a trucking company. My job was to take numbers from the printouts of the company’s mainframe, copy them on to large sheets of ruled green paper, and perform analytical calculations on them. If I had stayed in that job, I would have been replaced by a spreadsheet.

We had mechanical adding machines, but we needed to do divisions as well. This resulted in a lot of very tedious work. When the first four function calculators became available that fall, we begged the boss to buy some. They were expensive. About $400 each, at a time when I was being paid about $180/week, and that was good money. When we got the calculators, they made our lives much easier.

There is no way that school children were asked to buy calculators in the fall of 1971.

Wretchard wrote: “The probable reason for the anachronism is that the author of Dreams misremembered something.”

Woops! That interesting phrasing leaves open the implication that the “author of Dreams” was not one Barry Soetero. In Politically Correct circles, a shocked silence would descend on the crowd.

The only point of “Dreams” was to let left-wing Big Government media describe Barry as an accomplished author and a deep thinker. That book was his only real accomplishment, the reason why he was fit to be President. Those promoting Obama did not actually want to discuss the substance of the book. The liberals probably did not even read the book. Nor, apparently, did anyone from the McCain campaign.

My first calculator was a 4 function Bomar, purchased from Sears in 1973 for $100.00. HP-35′s were available for $400.00 then; that was too expensive for me then and in fact it still is. Electromechanical caluctaors were available years before that; they were even more expensive than the digital ones.

Bill Clinton “recalled” participating in civil rights protests when in grammar school; the trouble was, there were none going on that far back.

Algore related his mother singing the union song “Look for the Union Label” as a tiny tot. Trouble was, the song had not been written yet.

Hillary Clinton once explained that she had been named after Sir Edmond Hillary, the man who scaled Mt. Everest. Trouble was, at that time Sir Edmond was Mr. Hillary, an obscure beekeeper in England.

We are dealing with people who, to use a Star Trek phrase, “Never tell the truth when a lie will do as well.” I guess they just like to keep in practice.

One of the fellows in my dorm at TAMU in 1970-71 had a 4 function calculator that his dad paid about $400.00 for; we were all amazed. Up until that time all we had were the mechanical adding/tabulation machines. Some of the cool guys would race those things in labs at night. I still have both a circular and linear slip stick. I use both on occasion but am not in that sort of world much anymore. Spread sheets are much more important to me now.

Some of the paper program HP’s from the late 70′s-early 80′s were just plain cool. Lots of horsepower in that old plastic.

I think Bill Ayers just slipped up when he wrote Barry’s biography. Those things happen when you don’t write you own life story.

Went to college in 1973. One of my fellow NROTC mids was an engineering student and was eventually commissioned a CEC officer. His parents had given him a four function plus TI calculator for his HS graduation present. About $400 if I recall, big money in those days for most of us. So I think the point is, if Obama had a calculator in 1971, he wasn’t quite as underprivileged and held down by “The Man” as the media’s romantic hagiography makes him out to be.

It was slide rules for us in high school. The El Cheapo choice of the time was something called a six inch Ricoh. For those who valued compactness and didn’t mind remembering how many left and how many right turns one went past on a circular, there were circular slide rules, made of plastic. I had a straight Ricoh rule and remember lining up the cursor against the zero marks by fiddling with the screws so that the line fell perpendicularly. It was made of bamboo, I remember, while the K&E’s were made of dark enameled hardwood.

You used to powder the rules to make them slide smoothly. And you could buy little plastic protectors in them to keep them clean.

If you were in funds it was K&E, which was made of hardwood. There was a mythical beast called a Pickett, which nobody I knew actually had, but which represented the Ideal slide rule.

Those were also the days of T-squares and ruling pens, triangles, French Curves (not what you think) and drawing ink. Yes ink. You used to file down the points of your ruling pen so it would make fine lines and learn to carefully place the guide rule on some other piece of plastic to keep the ink from creeping under it when you inked over the penciled drawing.

The mechanical pencils of that era had a little nozzle grip and you let out the lead to let a quarter inch protrude. Then you took this little sharpener off the rear end of the mechanical pencil and rotated it round the lead to give a point. Either that, or you took an XActo knife and filed down the end.

As to calculators, the very first I ever had was a TI-57 programmable. Saved for months to buy that. But here’s the thing. I remember these details because it was important to me. These were my most prized possessions. I remember exactly when I got my first calculator because it was like buying a motorcycle or a car.

Personally, I wonder about that entry in Dreams. My take on it was that Barack Obama didn’t care about calculators or slide rules in the same way I did. It was a minor part of his landscape. I think some people remember things — like their first BB gun, or .38 revolver, girlfriend or car because they made such an impact at the time in their lives. But others apparently, have a different mental world. And where things are not important the memories are vague.

The only calculator that was really cheap in 1971 was an abacus. Since we know that Obama can’t count we also know he never had an abacus. Maybe he dreamed he had an electronic calculator in the hope it would change his math grades. You know, a hopey changey thing.

This great piece reminded me of Woody Allen’s essay, entitled “The Scrolls.” His writings, before he began making films or becoming a pedophile, are “pee in your pants” funny. I highly recommend them.

He begins-”Scholars will recall that several years ago a shepherd, wandering in the Gulf of Aqaba, stumbled upon a cave containing several large clay jars and also two tickets to the ice show. Inside the jars were discovered six parchment scrolls with ancient incomprehensible writing which the shepherd, in his ignorance, sold to the museum for $750,000 apiece.”

It also contains this classic-”The authenticity of the scrolls is currently in great doubt, particularly since the word ‘Oldsmobile’ appears several times in the text.”

On the subject of anachronisms, I once heard a NPR girl reporter give a breathless account of the fire-bombing of Dresden, in which Allied “jets” dropped bombs multiple times that night. As for the SCOAMF’s “calculator”, it could well be that the original manuscript had “slide rule” instead, but some well-meaning editor changed it to “calculator” for fear of confusing the book’s intended audience, who wouldn’t know what a slide rule was, much less how to use one.

In 1952 I had a handheld calculator in 5th grade in a Catholic school in Minneapolis. I bought it for 25 cents at Woolworth, which was a lot of money in those days.

My calculator did addition and subtraction. If you were clever it did multiplication. Division was done using pencil and paper using the “long division” algorithm. Square roots required a good brain or a slide rule.

I had a Pickett slide rule. Yellow enamel on aluminum frame. Mr. Carson (math Dept. head) had two prizes to award. My buddy, Jeff Brown, got the K&E slide-rule. I coveted that. I got some dumb ole bronze medal from Bausch & Lomb, not that their intentions weren’t wonderful. Just, being slightly impoverished, the K&E was very attractive.

Pickett required petroleum jelly (Vasoline) to lubricate. Then you had to adjust those tiny aluminum screws on the cursor. Easy to bung-up the slot or threads. Had to send for replacements.

I remember the Koh-I-Noor pens and mechanical pencils as well. Used a sandpaper paddle to point the pencils.

Docbill @ 18 – you should have come over to the Dept. of Chemical Engineering. Some company donated a Wang calculator system. Main unit with slave consoles displaying neon tube numbers. One master console had a recordable drive like an 8-track tape. Gary Hamilton (senior EE) and I (Junior ChE) sneaked (snook, snaked, ?) into the grad student office on the weekend and learned how to write little program sequences to do our repetitive calcs for homework assignments. Good times. Gary went to work for the South Texas Project. Nuclear Power.

Commandante Zero did not and could have not used a calculator in fifth grade, and as a child in Muslim school in Indonesia could not have and would not have eaten an unclean animal such as a dog. These are lies inserted into the text by **** to defame the maximum light worker.

In 1973, as a promo for opening a bank account, we were allowed to buy a calculator for $40. I suppose it was retailing for more than that or it wouldn’t have been offered in lieu of a toaster or whatever.
What was min wage at the time, $2?
It did add, subtract, multiply, divide and its charge lasted about an hour.

26 & 18 – The TAMU Aero Engr Dept had a Wang by 1972. Much nicer to use than the IBM. The HPs and TIs started showing up in 1973 replacing the belt carried slide rules. Most of the AF used a version of circular slide rules for flight planning well into the 1990s. They are still sold. Cheers -

23. dlsadaChrist! I’ll probably have to give a few of my precious shekels to a terrorist and a pathological liar and buy this piece of tripe. Looks like a potential treasure trove.

Last year I bought Dreams From My Father for $1 at a used book store. I also downloaded it in a PDF at no cost. Here is a telling passage from page 104 [Chapter 10] of the PDF.

And I liked her son, Kyle Jr. He had just turned fourteen, and in all of his awkwardness-one moment frisky and bumping into me while we shot baskets together in the neighborhood park, the next instant bored and sullen-I could see all the contours of my own youthful struggles. Sometimes Ruby would question me about him, exasperated with a mediocre report card or a cut on his chin, baffled by a young man’s unruly mind.

“Last week he said he was going to be a rap artist,” she would report. “Today he tells me he’s going to the Air Force Academy to be a fighter pilot. When I ask him why, he just says ‘So I can fly.’ Like I was stupid. I swear, Barack, sometimes I don’t know whether to hug him or beat his skinny behind.”

Two years later Ruby has less hope for her son.[page 137-138 PDF, Chapter 13]

Ruby would call me at home just to talk about him, how she never knew where he was anymore, how his grades had continued to drop in school, how he hid things from her, the door to his room always closed.

Don’t worry, I would tell her; I was a lot worse at Kyle’s age. I don’t think she believed that particular truth, but hearing the words seemed to make her feel better. One day I volunteered to sound Kyle out, inviting him to join me for a pick-up basketball game at the University of Chicago gym. He was quiet most of the ride up to Hyde Park, fending off questions with a grunt or a shrug. I asked him if he was still thinking about the air force, and he shook his head; he’d stay in Chicago, he said, find a job and get his own place. I asked him what had changed his mind. He said that the air force would never let a black man fly a plane.

“Man, that’s the wrong attitude. You can do whatever you want if you’re willing to work for it.”

Kyle smirked and turned his head toward the window, his breath misting the glass. “Yeah, well…how many black pilots do you know?”
The gym wasn’t crowded when we arrived, and we had to wait only one game before we got onto the court.

Obama doesn’t know his country- he knew nothing about the Tuskegee airmen. Second, Obama is lazy- he never did any follow-up research to show Kyle that the Air Force welcomes competent people of any color. At the time of this conversation, there had been black Air Force pilots for over 40 years. But Obama didn’t know that. If Obama had known that, he would have informed Kyle. Or should I say that if Bill Ayers had known that ?

I wonder if there are any student handbooks from his school circa 1961 which would check the calculator claim. It doesn’t sound plausible for 1971. For 1973 or 1974, more plausible.

While Muslim Indonesians would not like dog, there are a lot of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia who may like dog as much as mainland Chinese.

The fallback defense, even if it were so, is that Obama was a whole lot more honest than John Kennedy. His Pulitzer Prize Winning Book, “Profiles in Courage” may have been largely ghost-written. And therefore “Dreams” is not only legitimate in that great Democratic Party tradition, it is positively distinguished in lineage.

Questions have been raised about how much of the book was actually written by Kennedy and how much by his research assistants. Some time after April 1957, journalist Drew Pearson appeared as a guest on the The Mike Wallace Interview[4] and made the following claim live on air: “John F. Kennedy is the only man in history that I know who won a Pulitzer Prize for a book that was ghostwritten for him.”[5] Wallace replied “You know for a fact, Drew, that the book Profiles in Courage was written for Senator Kennedy … by someone else?” Pearson responded that he did, and that Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen actually wrote the book. Wallace responded: “And Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for it? And he never acknowledged the fact?” Pearson replied: “No, he has not. You know, there’s a little wisecrack around the Senate about Jack … some of his colleagues say, ‘Jack, I wish you had a little less profile and more courage.’”[5]

Joseph P. Kennedy saw the broadcast, then called his lawyer, Clark Clifford, yelling: “Sue the bastards for fifty million dollars!”[5] Soon Clifford and Robert Kennedy showed up at ABC and told executives that the Kennedys would sue unless the network issued a full retraction and apology. Mike Wallace and Drew Pearson insisted that the story was true and refused to back off. Nevertheless, ABC made the retraction and apology, which made Wallace furious.[5]

However, years later historian Herbert Parmet analyzed the text of Profiles in Courage and wrote in his book The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (1980) that although Kennedy did oversee the production and provided for the direction and message of the book, it was clearly Sorensen who provided most of the work that went into the end product.[6] The thematic essays that comprise the first and last chapters “may be viewed largely as [Kennedy's] own work”, however.[3]:401

In May 2008, Sorensen clarified in his autobiography, Counselor, how he collaborated with Kennedy on the book: “While in Washington, I received from Florida almost daily instructions and requests by letter and telephone – books to send, memoranda to draft, sources to check, materials to assemble, and Dictaphone drafts or revisions of early chapters.” (Sorensen, p. 146) Sorensen wrote that Kennedy “worked particularly hard and long on the first and last chapters, setting the tone and philosophy of the book” and that “I did a first draft of most chapters” and “helped choose the words of many of its sentences”. JFK “publicly acknowledged in his introduction to the book my extensive role in its composition” (p. 147) Sorensen claimed that in May 1957, Kennedy “unexpectedly and generously offered, and I happily accepted, a sum to be spread over several years, that I regarded as more than fair” for his work on the book. Indeed, this supported a long-standing recognition of the collaborative effort that Kennedy and Sorensen had developed since 1953.

The probable takeaway here is that there is no easy way of telling what parts of public figure are real or mythical. An Acthtung Verboten sign hangs over President Obama’s school records, life at Occidental College, time in Indonesia, Selective Service card etc. I think the message is that the public is not meant to know a man as he is, but to electorally choose between electoral products created by the system. The product is the “real man” in that view. To question the truth of that product is unacceptable. What is really real is what is the official falsehood. What is really, really false is the unofficial truth, however close to the facts it is.

I remember I had a hand-me-down pickett slide rule I had gotten from an old engineer that went through on the GI bill? after WWII, complete w/leather case…also remember running out of scholarship money about a month before the end of the semester and having to take a job and missing the last 3 weeks of class…I had an A from the first part of the semester but locked up in the final because it was mostly the material from the 3 weeks of class I had missed…panicked and solved for deflection (when in doubt, solve for deflection…), requiring calculating cube root on my trusty pickett! I was scratching my head after the final wondering why my beam was so much chunkier than everyone else’s…ended up with a B+

regarding Dreams…I’ve seen comparison of what was purportedly Ayers writing side by side w/portions of Dreams, and if correct, smells a bit fishy. I have not read dreams; but, from that short passage, seems to have embellishment of mundane details in a somewhat unnatural way (as if talking about the Buddha’s life in the past tense, or something like that – a bit folklorish…

Gotta play the part of the defense lawyer tonight. While a handheld calculator would be out of the question, Sharp and other companies were selling _desktop_ electronic calculators since the late 60′s. While most schools wold not have had any space or patience for such devices, it is possible that an elite school like Punahou might allow them.

Do I believe any of what I wrote? No, but it is a possibility.

Another anachronism is the term “meal plan.” I don’t think that anyone used that phrase in 1971.

High school chemistry class, Fayetteville Arkansas, 1973. We spent the first week learning to use our (required) slide rules. A couple of exceptionally nerdy guys had TI calculators- big hulking things that hung on their belts and must have left bruises from bouncing off their thighs. Mr. Kreie got a gleam in his eye when the calculator boys walked in. He’d whip out his slide rule. “Want to race?”
Up to now, I’ve never wanted to read Obama’s memoirs, but maybe it would be worth it to find other anachronisms.

W @ 33: “An Acthtung Verboten sign hangs over President Obama’s school records, life at Occidental College, time in Indonesia, Selective Service card etc.”

And that is where things get really interesting. Why the Iron Curtain over Obama’s past? I have a suspicion that the bombshell being hidden is in Obama’s passport records — Did Barry as an 18-year old adult choose an Indonesian passport?

But more interesting than what is being hidden is why so many Democrats would go along with being denied access to the Ark of the Covenant? Democrats like to think of themselves as the majority party. (That’s the meaning of Bolshevik, by the way). With so many Democrats to choose from, how did Democrats end up with someone who required the protection of “official falsehood”?

eb @ 35: Another anachronism is the term “meal plan.” I don’t think that anyone used that phrase in 1971.

I had a “meal plan” at college c. 1971, most everyone in the dorms had one, and I even bought into them occassionally when I lived off-campus.

fwiw

As for who wrote what, it seems to me unlikely Obambus has ever written three coherent pages by himself in his whole life. When he gives a long speech it wanders, and the wacky parts are probably those he wrote himself.

Some sources say that is not easy to eat dog in Indonesia. Indonesia is a Muslim country and eating a dog is haram. Both Lolo Sotoro (foster) and Barack Obama (biological) fathers were Muslim. So who gave him a dog to eat? His mom?

So the dog eating story itself is probably false. Or about as true as his 5th grade calculator tale. The question is, why did he write it into his biography when it wasn’t even true? To appeal to American voters?

Both stories are not even necessary lies, needed to cover up for something illicit or illegal. If they are falsehoods, they are entirely throwaway lies. Gratuitous embellishments. Yet he put them in and now they’re coming coming back to bite him.

Fabricators are way ahead of the mob. They know that certain groups will pounce on things like “Bush documents” done in MS Word, and that certain others will ignore key details.

As an aside, should we worry when people can’t build the very tools they use? Making your own slide rule is tricky enough, but you need engineers to make a calculator from scratch and then make a billion of them. How are fundamentals maintained when everyone skips straight to cutting-edge stuff? Old protocols must get enshrined like ancient spells… don’t even know how they work sometimes.

The phrase “willing suspension of disbelief” seems to sum up the MSM’s approach to Obama’s life. They found a story they liked and are sticking to it with hardly a shred of evidence that it conforms to reality. We love what we imagine our lovers to be long before we love them and in the end we probably re-imagine them and love that. Whatever gets you through the night.

The real question in my mind is who stares back at him from the mirror? Can’t imagine what sort of fellow would hire someone else to write is autobiography but the voice I hear in Dreams just doesn’t sound like the one reading from the teleprompter.

The funny thing is that it is very possible that the entire dog eating incident may have been simply invented by Bill Ayers to add a little color to the story — to make Barack Obama seems just a little more exotic and interesting to American readers. Ayers may not have realized that the odds of a Muslim family knowingly eating dog meat are virtually zero, and certainly never forsaw putting Obama through a wringer of mockery 17 years in the future.

If that’s the case, then imagine the total burn Barack Obama is going through today, with the nation openly mocking him for eating dog meat, when it might have never even happened. Yet to deny it, Obama would have to admit not writing his own autobiography, which would be even more devastating to his image than eating the dog meat.

If this is true, then all he can do is shut up and take it. If this is the case, what delicious poetic justice. Hoisted with his own ghost-written petard.

The dog-eating “incident” kinda makes one wonder what Teh Won meant in 2010 when he complained that his critics “talk about [him] like a dog.”

“‘Some powerful interests who had been dominating the agenda in Washington for a very long time and they’re not always happy with me. They talk about me like a dog. That’s not in my prepared remarks, but it’s true,’ he told the union crowd.”

You all just made me go and find my father’s slide rule. It’s a K&E from the early ‘40s in a leather case. The veneer looks like ivory.

In 1975, I had a chemistry professor who only allowed us to use slide rules on his tests. At the moment, I don’t remember how to use one.

With all the talk, I went to the library a couple of days ago and checked out Dreams etc. Haven’t been motivated to open it yet. Some of the dog jokes have been killers, though. Gotta love Treacher and Iowahawk. Recent tweet:

There seems to come a point when a fraud becomes unable to “hold things together” even with large amounts of duct tape and fishing line-when everything done or said either backfires or is mocked. The actor appears to be jinxed. With Carter, it began with the failed desert rescue and the last straw was the legendary “killer rabbit.” There were so many in between, I can’t remember them. All these little indignities played against a backdrop of “stag-flation,” cardigan sweaters, Rose-Garden handwringing and navel-gazing, and a constant confused, constipated look doomed him. Things like this present “man-eats-dog” lie inserted in a 1996 “autobiography” now becomes “dog-eats-man” truth. You can almost hear Ayers’ taking a White House phone-call this week-Bill-WTF were you thinking with that dog tale?”

My people come from central-Georgia-a dirt poor, drawling drooling crowd with the temperament, intelligence level and appearance of those described in Harry Crews’ autobiography-missing digits, ricketts, cancer of the lip-that sort of thing. We consumed copious amounts of clay and chalk but we never ate dog. Given that Barry is as skinny as a meth-addicted fence post, I pray that the Indonesian Dog Diet doesn’t break into a fad.

W @ 33: “An Acthtung Verboten sign hangs over President Obama’s school records, life at Occidental College, time in Indonesia, Selective Service card etc.”

And that is where things get really interesting. Why the Iron Curtain over Obama’s past? I have a suspicion that the bombshell being hidden is in Obama’s passport records — Did Barry as an 18-year old adult choose an Indonesian passport?
……………
The left wing FactCheck.org admits that Obama was a dual citizen until he was 21.http://factcheck.org/2008/08/obamas-kenyan-citizenship/

Anytime I read an “autobiography” that has detailed dialogue, in quotes, supposedly from memory and not a recording, I get pretty suspect. There are very, very few moments from any portion of my life that’s more than a few days in the past where I can vividly remember the actual words that people said. Even then, it’s only fragments and I’m 100% sure that my memory has mangled the actual wording, even if the gist of the conversation was right. I sure as hell can’t remember dialogue from the 5th grade, even from my most memorable parts of that time in my life. Much less, some seemingly random and fairly trivial conversation like that quoted by Gringo in 31.

Am I just a mental defective and do many of you actually remember details like Buraq supposedly does here? Or is this utter bullcrap like I suspect? (17 @RWE nails it)

Oh, and I actually took drafting classes just before CAD became ubiquitous, so I know what Wretchard is talking about, even the non-sexy French Curves.

When I was in school, we weren’t asked to bring calculators until we took first-year algebra. For me that was 8th grade – in 1992, with a lot more advanced technology available at a lower inflation-adjusted price than 1971. Prior to that it was unnecessary and thought to be counterproductive. Only after we’d mastered arithmetic to the point that adding and multiplying big numbers was a time-sucking distraction from more advanced concepts instead of being good practice was it okay to start taking the electronic shortcut.

sol (25)– In the beginning telephones did not have keypads OR dials. At least, our first telephone (c. 1943) didn’t have either of those. Instead, it had a sophisticated voice recognition system, so all you had to do was speak the number into the mouthpiece. Sometimes it had trouble with my grandma’s accent, so I had to place her calls for her.

I graduated high school in 1971 and we used slide rules. I still have mine and it works as well and as fast as any calculator. Even faster when doing proportions. Calculators in 1971 were mostly mechanical and hand cranked or had an electric motor. The few electronic calculators were outrageously expensive. Still, I believe that making you learn how to do math by hand (especially graphs and things) is better training. That way if the calculator breaks you’re not up the creek without a paddle. Ship’s navigators still practice using sextants and hand calculations, just in case. GPS is subject to interference or being totally knocked out by a severe solar storm.

Funny, but my current cell phone has more computing power, they tell me, than the computers which took our astronauts to the moon and back – including the MASA computers on the ground.

Ah, memory, fickle companion… In 1969 I entered college and it was a big deal to get time at a teletype to run little BASIC programs on the mainframe. People had slide rules. By the summer of 1970 I saw (and was allowed to help use) a computer with orange neon tube display (8 digits) which was about 12″ x 12″ x 6″ that came with a card reader the size of a toaster and could do –are you sitting down?!– trig. One line of code. By 1978 h-p and Texas Instruments had brought out true hand-held calculators with lots of functions but they were very pricey, hundreds of bucks.

I see no way that Punahou or any other school in 1971 –or probably even in 1981– was recommending or even mentioning calculators for its students. They didn’t exist in any relevant form in 1971, and even in 1981 they would have existed only in a form so expensive as to make them irrelevant. If Hopey had really remembered a calculator in his Punahou catalog, he would have stopped to tell us all about it. It would have been a very big deal; something that characterized the school as not just elite but super-technical. Like being picked for Astronaut Prep or something. In which case the “calculator” wouldn’t have been optional, it would have been the center of the curriculum. I suppose there is a really long shot argument that the author meant a slide rule or an electric or mechanical adding machine. But nobody called a slide rule a “calculator,” in my world. And an electric or mechanical adding machine would have been impossibly heavy, bulky, fragile and expensive. It would be like taking a typewriter to school. Hey, I learned to type in high school (best course I ever took, thank you Miss Fredeen). But would I have been learning how to type or run an adding machine at age 10? I don’t think so.
So, to beat the horse already well-thrashed by the rest of you all, I don’t think this detail can be true. And as they say, false in one, false in all.

#47 jms:
My father used to call it “the salesman’s revenge”. No matter what he says
or does about the “dog-eating incident” it only makes him look more pathetic
in peoples’ eyes. Most times it takes careful thought to put someone in this
position on purpose but in the case of our “smartest man in ANY room” president
it should be a piece of cake. Maybe our best defense against this liar is to
just LAUGH HIM OUT OF THE HOUSE every time we catch him in a lie. To a man of
his immense ego that would be like daylight to a vampire. So many lies, so much
opportunity.

“The phrase “willing suspension of disbelief” seems to sum up the MSM’s approach to Obama’s life. They found a story they liked and are sticking to it with hardly a shred of evidence that it conforms to reality.”

Ever heard of the book “I, Rigoberta Menchu”‘ Joe? A total fabrication. Yet believed by all the “right people”.

It’s more deep than just MSM abdication of responsibility, Joe.

Con artists know that the best cons happen when the mark wants to believe on some level. Yes, the MSM and their Dem masters lie and propagandize at every turn. We should not be surprised when dogs bark. But to paraphrase from “The X-Files”‘ the Obamanauts WANT to believe.

Vast swaths of the usual suspects, pseudointellectual rubes all – public school teachers and other educators, public employees, entertainers, class of ’68ers, self styled “dreamers” and others of that mental vein – read Ayers’ ghost written pages and the words took root the way crabgrass seeds do on fresh loam. Here, finally, was the individual who made the possibility of their crappy little narrative a reality. Here, at last, was the one who would take their dreams – hopes which all those meanies had shown were ridiculous and unworkable all those decades – and stick a big middle finger up to the meanies and make the cherished impossible dream actually work in the real world. Here, finally, was the one who would legitimize their worldview and force everyone else to see how wonderful that worldview (and the ones who held it, of course) really were after all.

Critique the MSM as you like. I’ll go right along. But in the absence of the pseudointellectual rube and her desire for some figure that would validate an immature and ridiculous vision for human society, the MSM propaganda and failure to vet the likes of Obama goes nowhere. This is predominantly a bottom up thing.

I bought a TI-57 in the mid ’70s. Programmable, but you had to key in the program sequence every time (no memory stick). As error-prone as that procedure was, the machine beat a slide rule hands down for my quantitative methods chemistry class. We needed answers to 4 significant figures, and slide rules only went to 3.

One of the biggest problems using ordinary calculators was fat-fingering part of a sequence of computations. The TI-57, once you got the proper sequence coded, eliminated that error. And, of course, if you needed to repeat the calculations for several experiments, there was no need to repeat the manual calculations. And your calculations were always correct.

#61 There was a fellow in our neighborhood that did road ralleys with an Austin Healy 3000. He had a Curta that his nav. guy used on time distance etc. calculation. I have both K&E and Picket rules in the leather cases. The circular is a K&E.

Barry’s landslide unelection this fall is going to really bend his ego; a stunning fall from grace for an afferamitive action President. He may be ready for some shrink time. Those ought to be very interesting conversations.

No mo uro @ 66: “But in the absence of the pseudointellectual rube and her desire for some figure that would validate an immature and ridiculous vision for human society, the MSM propaganda and failure to vet the likes of Obama goes nowhere. This is predominantly a bottom up thing.”

Agreed that the MSM finds a ready market for its pap, but is it really a ‘bottom up thing’?

Back in the Victorian era in Britain, a man who had been particularly successful would build a church. At the start of World War I, British ladies would hand white feathers to males who were reluctant to heed the call to join the armed forces. ‘Bottom up’ only a century ago looked very different from ‘bottom up’ today. Why is that?

It may be that national media is a kind of self-licking ice cream cone, which modifies its audience. Certainly, advertising works. And if the Dominant Media continually advertises a specific message about behavior, over time it will establish that behavior as permissible.

Indeed, she was deeply involved in CIA activities, not to mention VP of the Bank of Hawaii (the two facts are not unrelated). Barry’s grandfather was also involved. This is one of the great unspoken stories about Barry. The only place I have ever seen this mentioned is in Angelo Codevilla’s piece in The Claremont Review. An indispensable piece of Barry history for those who haven’t read it.

Let’s see – if little Barry entered Punahoe for classes in September, he would have just turned 10, so likely he would have been in the fifth grade by my dumb reckoning. I know Punahoe was all hoity-toity, and Buraq is the three dimensional chess player-lightworker and all, but nearly all schools for the fifth grade are still teachin readin, writin, and ‘rithmetic, not algebra, calculus, chemistry or physics or anything else that would require the services of a calculator, even if they were affordable or available at that time, which they were not. In fact, any good teacher would have wanted little Barry to not use the calculator but figure arithmetic out the old fashioned long hand way at that age.

No way the average family would buy a calculator for a kid in 71! By 76 there were a number of affordable calculators on the market (I drooled over the programmable HP35 which I couldn’t afford) Kindof makes me wonder how somebody mixes up those details – probably benign as I can see no political motive.

Barack seems like a nice guy. On one level he connects with America very well. And I believe George Bush who said that nobody takes the job of POTUS for any reason other than to serve this country. But actions and results, not intentions and dreams count in the end. And that is what judges President Obama.

Now it is sort of possible that Obama can pull a repeat of 96 and convince the media to ignore Romney. Sort of.

While I understand Richard’s purpose of this essay was to explore how our own memories of our lives are massaged and managed both unconsciously and consciously to create who we are, and to springboard from that to the unquestioned faux hagiography around Obama’s life. I am, however, like others in the thread lured off into a treasured part of my own past life.

I, too, was in the beginning of my career training during “…the days of T-squares and ruling pens, triangles, French Curves (not what you think) and drawing ink.” Our final in Surveying/Drafting consisted of a survey of the campus in which we used a hand compass and chain for part, transit and level rod for part and plane table and level rod for a section of topographic work. The final consisted of committing this survey to a map of the campus to be graded by placing it over a velum base map on a light table and noting any variances between the “school solution” and our effort. Width of lines, scale, general appearance, lettering, etc. were all graded. I remember one man who, when almost finished inking his map (with a ruling pen), picked up a straightedge without pennies taped to the bottom and ended up with a whole side of the administration building with the ink wicked up a half to three quarters of an inch from his intended line. No amount of chipping with a razor blade could totally correct it. We all looked upon him as we would a member of the class who had died.

I also remember doing latitudes and departures by hand and a log table for road surveys and how much easier that became with a slide rule, circular: plastic and cheap. The next year I bought a second-hand K&E. It was bamboo and plastic and came with a small textbook of instructions. I considered it the epitome of technology and I still have both.

Ten years later (early 70’s), in a continuing education course, my employer bought me an HP calculator and I remember that it cost about $350. The manner of inputting the formula string was not intuitive and was known to us all as “reverse Polish notation”. The next iteration of that machine used magnetic strips with pre-entered formulas that you would insert into the top of the calculator and then all you had to put in manually was your data string. The guys that had those carried a little booklet of those strips around with them.

I am still awed by the fact that I can now purchase a TI hand-held calculator that easily exceeds my mathematical knowledge for less than $40.

I used slide rules in high school and college, getting a 4 function calculator in my Junior year. I used to use the slide rule to check the calculator. And I recall my calculator being passed around among three of us when doing exams.

The slide rules were plastic and made by Sterling, I think it was. Never had a Pickett or K&H anything that fancy. The EE students had fancier ones for special functions.

When I worked on my pilot’s license I got a circular slide rule, called an E6B, which had special functions for calculating true airspeed, flght time, fuel burn, wind drift and so forth.

I have some WWII vintage pilot’s circular slide rules that were used for E6B type calcuations. I have seen special slide rules used to calcuate aircrfat weight and balance. Also, I read that some analysts made up some special slide rules for the B-29 crews to use for reporting Japanese ships sigehdt during their bombing raids. Aircrew would invariably sight a submarine and describe it as a cruiser or a tanker and call it a battleship. The special slide rules enabled them to use their fire control lead computing gunsights combined with the known aircraft altitude and calculate ship lengths.

A friend of mine graduated from engineering school in 1972 and went into the US Army as an artilleryman. He often used his HP-35 to calculate gun trajectory info when the dedicated computer broke down. Of course that meant his unit always got the crummy gun computer.

The great thing about slide rules is that they were so easily customized to spcific needs. Today a hand held calucator or even an iphone app to translate gunsight data into ship lengths probably would cost the DoD $1M or more.

“Barack seems like a nice guy.” No. He. Does. Not. Unless you go for the nefarious sort of fellow. Everything about him seems wrong. Like you are looking at an ill-fitting mask trying to hide what lies behind it. Think we may be treated to the mask slipping off before November. Then the rats wouldn’t be able to scurry away fast enough from any association with the Tainted One.

Would seem a crowd-sourced question would return a lot of data. Yearbooks and other pictures of classrooms from then and the surrounding years. Personal copies, old classmates rediscovered thru facebook, etc.

Wager it’s a sliderule. Perhaps the ghostwriter never used (or even saw) one.

Bill Ayers was born in 1944. He simply mixed up some of his own history with Obama’s. I’d bet that some of his memories of college – meal plans, calculators, etc. – found it’s way into Obama’s “autobiography”. BTW, even in places where Islam holds sway, many traditional customs (eating dog in much of East Asia)still exist.

As someone pointed out above, Indonesia is not just a Muslim country in makeup. But more to the point: how devout were most Muslims in the 60′s and 70′s, especially since being beyond the reach of the Saudi Wahabbists at that time?

I graduated from college in 1971, during which time I moved from slide rule to keep punch card driven IBM computers. My second year in my first job in corporate America got me access to a Marchant Calculator (mechanical adding machine.) In 1973 I wrote a Capital Expenditure Request(!) for a “portable” calculator that cost $250.
Obama’s “autobiography” is a pack of lies; the question is what was real, what was not.

The best answer I can give you is that in that older era the pseudointellectual rube phenomenon was, inherently, less widespread because the expectations and culture were more robustly proof against the sort of manipulation that Ayers, Obama,and the Dems used in the book. People in all ages have their gullibilities and conceits, but I think a number of things that exist now and didn’t then can explain the “why” part of your question.

Most folks were practicing and authentic Christians then, with all the norming and the exhortations towards humility and all the proscriptions against, and demonizing of, envy that go along with that sort of society. Prideful pursuit of the notions and narrative the left cherishes was simply viewed for its evil and destructive nature by the society at large. Not only was the public at large that way but a much, much higher percentage of the elites were imbued with those values as well. A nation like that is inoculated to one extent or another against the idea that a demagogic book and styrofoam columns constitute some logical confirmation and validation of principles that have always failed in the past. Finally, people had to be practical to survive in the era before the welfare state, and practicality and “willful suspension of disbelief” cannot coexist in the same mind or philosophy.

I do, however, get your analogy about the self-licking ice cream cone. I never meant to imply that the MSM was blameless, or did not contribute negative energy to the circus. As I’ve pointed out here before, it has become clear that the vast majority of humans cannot distinguish between visually compelling mass media that is fiction and reality. I just think that in earlier times there were societal and religious forces at work that did in fact push people into a zone, mentally, that would have resisted the suspension of disbelief if for no other reason than such resistance being a survival mechanism.

To put this in perspective, a $250 calculator in 1971 would have been a ten percent down payment on a Volkswagen Beetle (which cost around $2000 in 71-72 timeframe). So his being told to bring a calculator to fifth grade is an out and out lie, or it’s proof positive he had a silver spoon firmly in his mouth by the time he was in fifth grade.

Hmmm. I went to high school in a fairly well-off area in Orange County, CA, called Villa Park. Lots of rich kids at that school. (I did NOT fit in!)

I remember my 11th grade chemistry class – this would have been in fall of 72 or spring of 73. One kid in the class had a TI calculator, because his father worked for TI. They ran several hundred dollars.

The rest of us protested because we had to use sliderules. The teacher (Mr.Quartucci) responded that we were welcome to use a calculator if we wanted to, as it was just another computation device like a slide rule. We didn’t much like the answer, but that’s how the matter stayed.

When I took pre-med physics at the University of MN in 1973, the professor made the class vote on whether or not to allow calculators during exams. The thought being not everyone could afford one. I’m talking about basic calculators, not ones with advanced trig functions, although those were available. We voted “no” and used slide rules. The next year my in laws gave me a TI calculator–basic–valued at about $120. That’s $620 in 2012 currency. Yeah, I’d say Barry’s memory is a tad off.

52. Charles – Back in the day there were bars that I hung out at in Manhattan that this song by Levon Helm from the Band was something like an anthem: “Up On Cripple Creek”

Was just reminiscing and lamenting his passing on another forum. I did not realize until other posters brought it up that he also appeared in several movies I’d seen. My most vivid memory of him was his portrayal of Civil War General John Bell Hood in Tommy Lee Jones’ movie “In The Electric Mist”. A powerful, compelling and moving performance – he will be missed.

I was making pretty good money by ’73 and bought my first calculator, a TI four-function with one or two levels of memory and cutting edge rechargeable ni-cad batteries for $149.00 plus GA sales tax. $150 was a lot for a toy in ’73 and you could still buy a running, half-decent car for under $500.

@63 – To get your Merchant Marine Master’s licence, you’ll still do it all by hand other than the actual math; you can use a calculator to do the actual calculations but you have to do everything else by memory and with pencil and paper. You make a LOT of use of rhymes and nemonics to remember those formulae. By the standards of the ’60s I wasn’t a very good math student, but by today’s standards, I’m an effin’ genius, at least up to the basic algebra and geometry level. When I sat for my Master’s licence, few of the younger members of my class even survived to take the exams because they couldn’t handle the ARITHMETIC, yes, arithmetic and even with a calculator they couldn’t plug and chug formulae. Until you get into offshore celestial navigation, it’s all arithmetic and knowing the formulae and what step comes next. I’ve bought some calculus and trigonometry for idiots books to get up to at least doddering speed on math I haven’t done in almost 50 years so I can have a prayer at an offshore license.

#62 bof, was that voice recognition system a female voice that announced it’s presents with the words number please?

As to a slide rule, I got my first one issued to me in my Comm school in the service in 1968. As a funny aside, our daily blitzes were graded by our instructor but our weekly exam was done by filling out a computer card. (pencil in the little square.A,B,C,D,E) One guy didn’t do all that well on the blitzes but he would manage to ace the weekly tests every time. At the end of the course he requested permission to speak to the Commanding Officer. He then admitted to the CO that he had been a computer programmer before joining the Corps and had recognized the program they were using. It seems that if he just filled in all Es it would trick the program and give him a perfect score. Last I heard of him he was a private learning how to string wire and climb poles.

And then, about Muslims and dog meat. There is a Hadith about Mohammad being served dog meat so it is not that far from possible though I don’t think he liked it all that much.
“All animals on land are permissible, as long as there is no evidence to prohibit them, and as long as they are slaughter correctly. Allah says in Quran, “Made lawful to you this day are At¬Tayyibât [all kinds of Halâl (lawful) foods, which Allâh has made lawful (meat of slaughtered eatable animals, etc., milk products, fats, vegetables and fruits, etc.)]. The food (slaughtered cattle, eatable animals, etc.) of the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians) is lawful to you and yours is lawful to them…” (Al-Ma’idah 5:5)
Of course there is also something in the Hadiths about being prohibited from eating animals with fangs so it is kind of a toss up.

“Did Barack Obama eat a dog? Did he bring a calculator to 5th grade in 1971? Who knows? Worse, who in the media really cared?”

Well, I guess I believe that Obama knew Rev. Wright and attended his church x 20yrs., but does anyone in the congregation ever remember seeing good ole’ Barack there? It seems that Obama still doesn’t have any old friends.

Regardless, the Progressive psychologists sure had the MSM “Journalists” pegged. But hopefully they’ve underestimated the bulk of American people existing outside of the Progressive Fantasyland.

Went to a private junior high in Greenwich CT. $3,500 a year. NO electronic calculators in 1970. In 1973 got my first calculator at prep school in New Canaan CT. Dad worked for IBM as a wizard but would not buy me the HP. I got the TI, $180. It was the second one in school till the end of the year. I still have my all metal “calculator” that added and subtracted with a little metal poker. It wasn’t a slide rule. I still have mine and now my Dad’s Delta slide rule. No school in 1970 asked it’s students to provide an “electronic” calculator. Not even in 1974 when I graduated.

I was in college when hand held calculators became available. My first one was a TI in 1974 that I was able to afford when my department head recommended me for an internship that actually included a paycheck.

The solution to the calculator and dog eating mysteries may then be as follows. The calculator referred to in the book was a mechanical calculator of the sort that you operated with a dial or a pencil point. The dog was served up to him by an adventurous father eager to show him the local scene. That would be consistent with all the declared facts, to what degree of probability, I don’t know.

A word about eating dog, snake and grasshoppers. In the Philippines dog is sometimes eaten, most commonly by the northern uplanders who it is said were connected in ancient times to the inhabitants of Taiwan. Some lowlanders have this habit, but dog meat is obtained in what I would call the custom meat market, along with goat, etc. You don’t get it in the supermarket or even your average wet market.

The guy who wants to eat goat, for example, very often has to contact someone who will get it for him custom, especially in the big city. That was back in the day, it may have changed, but it surely remains true of dog. You can’t rock up to the Mega-Mall or the Greenhills Shopping Center and ask for two pounds of dog. Goat was often prepared (as was dog) in a dish called kaldereta and the remainder turned into stuff like bopis or just simmered in a little vinegar and salt, maybe with a peppercorn of two thrown in.

You’d wander through some low income area and occasionally watch a goat or dog being prepared, perhaps by uplanders or perhaps by lowlanders who had acquired the taste or simply had someone give them a dead dog. For some reason, the procedure involved singeing the hair off the goat (or dog) and I have memories of men in boxer shorts (but wearing leather shoes) patiently squatting on some ruinous wall blow-torching a dead goat. The blow-torches were of course the kind you pumped up with a little push rod.

As to toasted grasshopper. I think the word used is wrong. Such as were served probably weren’t really grasshoppers. They were locusts. You couldn’t find enough grasshoppers to feed a cat, but locusts when they came to ravage the farmer were another matter. The farmers would take their revenge by gathering them up by the bushel and then deep frying or toasting the suckers.

Snake — well that’s a tough one. Snake is hard to get as meat. I’ve been in places that were infested by snakes near lake Mainit, but never can remember a time when you could count on having snake for a regular menu item.

The poor also eat field mice, fish guts, and offal items that the market looks askance at. Generally eating snake, dog and locusts is a poor man’s game. You won’t see it served much in the homes of oil company executives with international development consultant wives, in the Philippines, at least. But Indonesia might be different.

I’m old enough to remember that “organ meats” were much more popular than they are now. It wasn’t all that long ago that I was sent to a local KFC for a bucket of chicken livers though.
Goat is still on the menu in some of the “authentic” Mexican restaurants here in Texas. Growing up much of my life in Oklahoma the kids, Indians included, all had jokes about eating dog. I think the Kikapoo still have a yearly ceremony where dog is eaten. Heh, I’d dare PETA to show up and try to start a fuss. They’d probably go missing. I can’t find it but there was an essay on why eating organ meats and a wider variety food types was better for you and you should graze at the Deli more often. Of course there was no experimental or statistical support for the conclusion in the essay.
I’ve been buying skinless, boneless, chicken thighs, for my protein uptake. If you flatten them out a bit they are easier to prepare on a Foreman grill and are not as dry as breasts and are cheaper…at least they were, now the “foodies” have discovered dark chicken meat…dang it.

Love this thread. My guess is that the editor of the book is a bit younger than those of us who remember the onset of calculators in the Seventies. He just assumed they have been around a long time and let it pass. I get the same thing with my children now with personal computers, cel phones and the internet. They can’t imagine a time when they were not around.

….#31, if Obungle claims he heard the mother of a friend say her son wanted to be a “rap artist “, well, we got another windy. The term wasn’t coined until the early 1970′s, in New York City, a long way from Hawaii, and hip-hop, aka rap, wasn’t popularized until the late 70′s, early 80′s.

Indeed, she was deeply involved in CIA activities, not to mention VP of the Bank of Hawaii (the two facts are not unrelated). Barry’s grandfather was also involved. This is one of the great unspoken stories about Barry. The only place I have ever seen this mentioned is in Angelo Codevilla’s piece in The Claremont Review. An indispensable piece of Barry history for those who haven’t read it.

wnmc @ 101 – My kid sister is eleven years younger than I am. When I was born, airlines flew prop planes, railroads used steam locomotives and the Man in the Moon ate green cheese. By the time she was born, airlines flew jets, railroads used diesel locomotives and men had flown into space. In a mere eleven years.

She was only eight when Apollo 11 landed on the Sea of Tranquility. More than half of all Americans weren’t even born on that day. So they have no memory at all of Project Apollo, and they are clueless as to where the Sea of Tranquility is located. Landing there was a really big deal to me.

My mother worked with a Korean immigrant, an engineer, who related a sad tale from his childhood.

His family was not what you would call poor by any stretch of the imagination, being the owners of a tea company. His dog, which he had he loved very much, had died and not too long thereafter his family was invited to dinner at a friend’s home. They were served dog. He started crying and was so upset they had to leave and take him home.

You have to wonder if that experience factored in his decision to come to the U.S.

I have NEVER questioned Richard F. before.
In fact, I admire his intellect and memory, and am VERY jealous.
But . . .
And now, totally hijacking a very interesting thread, here we go !

“If you were in funds it was K&E, which was made of hardwood. There was a mythical beast called a Pickett, which nobody I knew actually had, but which represented the Ideal slide rule.”

MY memory says Pickett’s were cheap. They were METAL. I had to start college
with a metal slide rule. Plastic coated ALUMINUM metal.
METAL = rather nasty expansion factors walking between warm buildings in freezing winter.

K&E: the gold standard of slide rules.
As I remember, not hardwood. Etched plastic over bamboo. Sealed against moisture.
I guess at least part of my memory is correct. I just went and looked. Yep, bamboo.

I followed the proper procedure for obtaining the coveted K&E.
Wait until just before the course “drop date”. Frequent the bookstores.
Grab one of the “used” K&E’s returned by rich students switching from Engineering to Business.
The had a nice leather case. And, contrary to folklore, NOBODY suspended them from their belt.
OK, I once did see a Engr. soph with one “on her belt”. She had, like Hillary, legs with calves like tree-trunks.

But, based on “other memories” which have been fact-checked by family, I could be wrong.

Which prove once agains that while Barack Obama says he wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth, the truth is that he probably was. He certainly had a wealthy benefactor. How else could he have afforded Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard?

Thanks for bringing up the K&E bamboo version. It kind of got me to wondering whether I was losing it because I distinct memories of borrowing somebody’s K&E (you know, just to hold it) and noticing that it was made of what I then thought of as “cigar box” wood. Dark wood. So I’m going to break the Four Post rule this once.

“The various 408x models are considered to be K&E’s premiere slide rules. Made of celluloid on mahogany, they feature an excellent and extensive scale arrangement. As one fellow enthusiast noted, Pickett’s may have gone to the moon, but these are the slide rules that probably built the bomb! The N designation (“New”) was adopted in 1949 for this series of rules, and presumably reflects the major scale and label change at that time.”

Now the reason I may have had such a high regard for the Picketts, none of which I actually saw in school (though I think I glimpsed one in college) is this:

Aluminium Pickett-brand slide rules were carried on five Apollo space missions, including to the moon, according to advertising on Pickett’s N600 slide rule boxes.

Now, to a miserable six-inch Ricoh slide rule owner like myself, K&Es and Picketts were like Bugatti Veyrons and Lamborghinis to a guy who drove a clapped out Beetle. So my impressions of the K&E were glimpsed from that fleeting moment when one slid through my hands.

I should say the same kind of class envy pursued me into the electronic age. I could only afford TIs. But the guys in funds had HPs. And the HP guys would constantly emphasize the superiority of RPN over the pedestrian TI’s more conventional notation because it saved one keystroke.

You don’t know how those reproofs went as daggers to my heart and it probably forged in me an unshakable conviction that I was doomed to be the eternal loser, condemned to the Ricoh’s and the TI’s. Nor has my luck changed. Technology advances but my position in tech loserdome never seems to change.

I type these words on a rotten HP Pavilion when all the cool dudes in the coffee shop are working on Macbook Airs. I’ll upgrade soon but that won’t change things any, I know. As one guy said to me once, there are some guys who are forever condemned. In his memorable phrase they could fall into a barrelful of t*** and come up sucking their thumb.

Dennis #73- . To an engineer of a certain age, memories of calculators past are stories of lost loves. As I recall, sometime in the mid 80′s I replaced my TI SR 50 with an HP 21C. I loved that little machine until I’d pounded the keys to the point it didn’t work any more. Sadly, they really don’t make them like that anymore.

It is likely that the author of Obama’s memoir did not remember correctly. An expert on memory, Elizabeth Loftus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus) has run experiments in which test subjects who visited Disneyworld were induced to falsely remember seeing various Disney characters, as well as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and other Looney Tunes characters!

It is possible Obama is just lying again. Truth is not exactly his forte.

It is also possible that at a school serving upper class Hawaiians, calculators were recommended even in 1971, despite the cost.

Finally, wasn’t Obama’s grandmother a bank executive? Maybe she gave Obama a calculator to take with him to school, but he remembered it to be a suggestion or requirement of the school.

Now, if only Obama could use that calculator to put together a budget….

Don’t carry on so. While I had (and have) a second-hand K&E bamboo slide rule, I type this on a rotten HP Pavillion as well. It is infinitely sadder that one who had risen to the exalted hights of a second-hand K&E has now descended to the depths of HP degradation.

These discussions highlight an important aspect of capitalism. A simple and bulky $400.00 calculator in 1971 was a treasure affordable by only a few. Today, a simple calculator is no longer bulky and is as disposable as a Cracker-Jack toy. (Yes, I know. This comparison dates me.)

Capitalism may not deliver equality of consumer goods at the same time, but over time, it delivers goods to consumers at cheaper and cheaper prices. (Unless, of course, those goods are regulated by the state, in which case the prices may not diminish.)

A 1971 $350 calculator would cost about $1863 in 2010 dollars. A $75 calculator would cost about $400 in 2010 dollars. Anybody who can afford Punahou School and live in Honolulu is not exactly poor.

With Madelyn Dunham the VP of the Bank of Hawaii and Stanley Dunham a furniture store owner things were good for Barky. Any way you cut it Barky was bestowed with a silver spoon… well, probably a full silver set including silver platters.

I type these words on a rotten HP Pavilion
………..
I like my Pavilion. I’ve been using HP’s for over a decade. They never give me trouble. I know their ways. I don’t want to have to learn an apple. I’m not impressed by their core. Nor do I want to spend the extra money for the brand.

He lied. He’s a liar. He didn’t really visit 57 states either. Was that misremembering? No. He just makes things up as he goes along and, worse, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s an ignorant, dishonest boob.

This whole series of comments makes me sad: All these guys loving on their slipsticks and such; Hearing about the course they had in HS, and such.

Mine was considered a good HS in CA, in 1979. Latin was canceled the year before I started. Greek, three years before. We had one chemistry class for just one semester. Calculus was a distant memory. Besides Algebra and Geometry, we only had stats, which they called math analysis. (I never got to take it, because it conflicted with my 4th year French class. Only available during 2nd period.)

I did it all in my head. Large numbers, quadratic equations, many decimal points, square roots. (Most used lots of scratch paper. Calculators of any kind were not allowed.) I was damned fine at math. What a damned waste of talent. All because public school has become tragically worthless. Just makes me sad to think of all I missed. To be able to reminisce fondly about a fine slipstick or early calculator is a fine thing. Count your blessings.

My sister was in the Philippines with the Peace Corps for two years. As far as dogs go, it’s not usually such a good life. According to my sister, dogs are treated as pests and eaten regularly. A friend of hers wanted to save a dog she saw in a store so she told the store owner she wanted to buy “that one”. He quickly grabbed the dog and beheaded it. The misunderstanding resulted in some significant psychological trauma for my sister’s friend. On the other side of things, my sister chose a street puppy, named it Oliver and spent an hour every night for a year picking the ticks off of him in her shack. She would parade him through the village on a leash and show all of the local children how to take care of a dog as a companion. When she left, she saw children with make-shift leashes and collars “walking” their pet dogs. It was on the island of Panay.

Marc Malone @ 120 – Why be sad about what you missed. If you missed something, now is the time to make up for it. Take advantage of the time you have now and learn on the internet about anything and everything you ever wanted to know. I personally missed out on a lot of sports when I was younger for various reasons. I’m doing it now and it’s a lot of fun! “Regress” back to that childhood state (being responsible and safe about things, of course) while you still can!

when we began our year of P-chem, our newly hired MIT-educated prof, asked the entire class if they would be willing to buy HP-35′s — the HP reps had recently toured the campus showing off their stuff — with the discount these babies cost us $350 (fall of ’73) — the entire class (about a dozen chem majors) took the bait — for the life of me I can’t remember the quid pro quo, seems to me we just got nastier exam problems…

Some would recognize the Sugar Hill Gang as the first popular rap band after “Rapper’s Delight” became a hit.

Many also would argue that the art form was well established on the street before they recorded their song.

Most would agree that the Acapella versions of Chain Gang, and others, preceded Rap.

One summer I was anointed with the name Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk while working a s warehouse job in North Texas for Cade Pioneer. George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic had just recorded one of their albums. Being the only white guy in the warehouse all I heard was P-Funk and other ’70′s soul music.

The men I worked with were great, real solid guys who immediately accepted me as part of the team. So, of course, I regularly would sneak into the office and put the radio station on a Country station. I’d then would time them to see how long it would take for them to figure out what had happened.

Of course they immediately began to call me Sir Nose because I was stealing the funk from the warehouse. They wanted to get Parliament’s Bop Gun and shoot me so I’d get the funk.

George, a straight-shooting foreman, was, to this day, one of the best men I’ve ever worked for. I learned, at an early age, more from him about leadership and respect than just about anyone except my father and one or two other mentors. He too was black.

The high-point of the summer was when they hired a couple of lazy-ass urban guys from some work program via the State. They needed help as business was good. Only these guys were lazy, low rent, vandals who spent most of the day throwing a knife across the warehouse into the boxed inventory (expensive building products).

I’d finally had enough because I was doing their work and knew they were going to eventually ruin some inventory. When I went to the Asst. Foreman, another great guy. He plainly told me to fire them if I thought they needed to be fired. That was a lot of delegated authority for a sixteen year old kid.

After one warning they immediately threw the knife into a box, I fired them, they didn’t believe me, and when they approached Olin he backed my decision.

And you don’t know hot, until you got on a lift and rose 20′ or so to the top of a rack during the hot Texas summer. Even still it remains one of the best summer jobs ever. Though I never did get hit with the Bop gun. Still haven’t…

By the way my family lived and this company were located near T.I. Though my father was not with T.I. almost all of our neighbors were. The early calculator story, if it was electronic is b.s. I vividly recall our large family getting one of the first T.I. four-function ones though an employee discount from one of our neighbors. We had to share it. This was an upper-middle class neighborhood, yet it was a big deal for us to have a T.I. calculator – much like getting our first color television.

What’s not being mentioned was that they were very hard to get due to limited production and increasing demand. There were too many customers willing and able to pay full price and wait to receive the product.

As and aside I was fortunate enough to meet Jack Kilby a few years ago, but that’s another story.

This age of Neo-Marxism is way over-rated. I would have any of those “un-educated” men sit as our President over the current one.

When it comes to the ability to think and to write, you are the richest man in the cafe, and one of the richest men in the world.

Your writing is so important and so beautiful that people like me halfway around the world admire you greatly and consider you a significant part of our lives.

If you want a new computer, let us know. I would be happy to contribute to a fund for that, as I’m sure many readers would be. I doubt it would take more than a week or two to fund the project. Seriously. It would be an honor.

Re the Punahou decal, it would have been either yellow or yellow with blue trim,(“buff & blue”) and a lot less sinister than the link shows. The “O” stands for “Oahuan”. Punahou was a damn good prep school – college was fairly painless afterwards, and they tested us so often that everybody got really good at taking standardized tests like the SATs.
I’d love to see Barry’s Punahou records – there seems to be very little from any of his teachers or classmates.

I was in AP physics in 1959 and got a Pickett log log decitrig with leather holster – very cool among the nerds.

Incidentally, mixed-breed dogs are called “Poi dogs” in Hawaii, as the early Hawaiians regarded them as food, not pets.

Marc Malone @ 120: “This whole series of comments makes me sad: All these guys loving on their slipsticks and such; Hearing about the course they had in HS, and such.”

I hope Wretchard will forgive me for a one-time excess posting. Slightly off topic, but Marc is right on the money. The educational system in US States used to be awesome, until the usual suspects steered it in a wrong direction in the later 1960s/early 1970s.

Some years ago, I was privileged to work with an engineer, a Vietnam-era marine, who considered himself to be a normal product of the Texas State educational system. No fancy schools for him.

One evening, when we were shooting the breeze about doing calculations, he mentioned that he was proud to have reached the semi-finals of the Texas State High School Slide Rule Championship. Slide rule proficiency in high schools!

Later, I mentioned a book by Richard Adams about the US Civil War as told from the perspective of General Robert E. Lee’s horse. The engineer immediately recalled from his high school history that the horse’s name was Traveller.

The US educational system used to be fantastic. And those high school graduates were the human capital that powered things like the Apollo Project. What a loss!

K&E: the gold standard of slide rules.
As I remember, not hardwood. Etched plastic over bamboo. Sealed against moisture.
I guess at least part of my memory is correct. I just went and looked. Yep, bamboo.

I followed the proper procedure for obtaining the coveted K&E.
Wait until just before the course “drop date”. Frequent the bookstores.
Grab one of the “used” K&E’s returned by rich students switching from Engineering to Business.
The[y] had a nice leather case.
——-
I just went and looked too. My Dad gave me his “Keuffel & Esser Co, NY” slide rule when I went to college, right after he saw the plastic one I brought home from the bookstore.

“Son, that simply won’t do.”

Leather case? Yup. Bamboo? Absolutely. It must have been a fairly new design when he bought it because it has etched on the edge, “Pat. April 1 ’24.” Only shortcoming – one of the screws holding down the slide is missing. Otherwise, perfect.

As I remember, he graduated from Dennison in 1932, so he kept it for 37 years before passing it on to me. And I’ve had it for another 47. I bring it out rarely, but when I do it gets gentle and revered treatment. After taking it out of the case, I’ll sit down and replay the fishing trip to Canada, our golfing together, him teaching me all about “points, plugs and condensers” and all the times he should have whipped my butt, but chose to teach instead. It is an heirloom that I will give to my son soon, with hopes his memories will be as fond as mine.

Sarah Rolph @ 125 When it comes to the ability to think and to write, you are the richest man in the cafe, and one of the richest men in the world.

Agree. The most important tool to use is the brain. Moreover, coming with no user’s manual, it’s a challenge to master. Who can know it?

Certainly folks @ BC are weary of some of my biblical analogies, but one may be useful here. Two cherubim overlooked the cover of the Ark-of-the-Convenant, the Mercy Seat. Theologians offer the opinion that they represent the integrity of God, specifically, justice and righteousness. The process of judging by a perfect standard that which was offered on the altar.

Today, even in the highest ranks of that particular government entity which engages in human space flight, where you would expect objectivity and discernment skills to honed to a fine edge, you find slovenly decisions occurring. If that is the case, what can you expect from the less qualified ranks of government in this great land.

Just as in the temple, we must post guards at the entrance to our “temple of thought” to ensure that thieves and liars are denied entrance.

I wish that a majority of Americans would benefit from the viewpoints and wisdom that is offered by the host here at BC. Additionally, after the various commenters conclude with mastication of the concepts, wisdom is on display for the benefit of all.

I don’t notice anybody sticking with the slide rules, right, cuz first the calculator and now the spreadsheet, programming environments, and industrial-strength math and graphics packages, put slide rules back in the same category as paleolithic category as flint spearheads.

Rather than three decimal places that you calculate one step at a time, and Ghu help you if you invert the order of the operands or slip the decimal point, a modern solution gives you 15 decimal points easily, all intermediate results, and repeatability of a billion-step process in less time than it takes to sip your coffee.

Remember the rare yard-long slide rule, in an attempt to get a fourth decimal point?

And hey, I have a couple of high-zoot sliderules tucked away somewhere, but the one I used the most (in high school) was a cheap plastic job because it was just as accurate in real life, even if the hairline was a few mils wider than on the finest. Hey remember what went with slide-rules – big huge CRC handbooks of log tables and trig functions to five (5) places or more. Wau. Then came these little calculators that would give you seven or nine or more places. Bye-bye CRC. Come to think of it, I spent a short time building math libraries for a couple of companies back then, Chebyshev polynomials and stuff, heck I had to maintain one vendor’s software floating-point package for a while, this was the stuff inside those calculators, folks. Remember buying the optional floating-point processors for your PCs and ATs? I spent $300 (and another $20 for some clock crystals) so I could run Mandelbrot patterns faster.

I remember 1972/3 college classmates in the real-world science and engineering fields, running out to buy those first HP calculators and the slipsticks were put away and never seen again. Then ten years later circa 1984 (!?) HP had a hit with the financial calculators that were hot for a couple of years, until everyone had Excel available.

Slide rules, bakelite wired dial phones, black and white TV with vertical hold problems, bias-ply tires, adjusting the points on your distributor, 45 RPM records, … don’t miss any of it. Though, yeah, I guess the world was younger in some ways, back when we were, and that’s not just our solipsistic view but is objectively true in some ways. Going along with slide rule tech we had “test pilots” who had to take up new jet planes, developed with slide-rule technologies, that might not work at all in real life. Now we’ve got finite element analysis and digital simulations such that those kinds of “surprises” are almost unknown.

Now if HP would just come out with a calculator that gave economic and political results …

While there was no rap in the early ‘Seventies, there were the talking blues over in the folk music genre.

I am told that back in the day, British engineers referred to slide rules as “guessing poles”.

It was a revelation to me that you didn’t need a lot of decimal places for many things. “Close is good enough”. Came with my introduction to the slide rule in high school chemistry.

To this day as a structural engineer, I can quickly size a beam or a footing “close enough” that the contractor can price it, then do the calculations to “prove” my design later back at the office.

Similar experience in the uniformed side of the Corps of Engineers. Make it strong enough and don’t sweat the small stuff: get the trucks over the river.

I have my Dad’s slide rule. He went to what was then the Agricultural station of the University of California at Berkeley. Now the University of California at Davis (the Aggies).

He went there int 1928: following year was the Crash and that was the end of his college and the start of his career in construction.

Rule is white plastic on what looks like birch wood. Has a leather case with a belt clip: he carved his name into the outside of the case and colored in the letters with ink.

In my Dad’s office and in the “computer lab” at Cal Poly Pomona in the mid’Sixties, they had Munroe electric mechanical calculators. (No computers in the computer lab.)

These calculators had about a 12 x 10 array of push buttons and had other buttons for add, subtract, multiply and divide. When you pushed the “execute” button, they went whir, clickity, clunk, clunk clunk, as the top carriage moved sideways to align with the gears of the drive below.

We used these with log tables to do surveying work-ups and other geometrical problems. Only two machines in the lab then, so I’d go in early before the commuter students got there.

Who cares what he did or didn’t do when he was a fifth grader? What matters is what he has done in the last 3+ years. That record alone should be enough evidence for anyone to see he needs to be retired.

Langley 136;
You’re leaving out Kamehameha, Iolani and Roosevelt, the other big schools of the day. There were others, but they slip my mind.

With his granny’s connections Obama might well have been a member of the Punahou “lucky sperm club” despite being hapahaole. I’m sure more will be revealed eventually.
I’d love to learn he was a Merit Scholar and got straight As all the way, but the silence is suspicious.

While we’re being nostalgic, does anyone else remember single channel radio control with rubber band escapments? Berkeley and Comet models? Fox motors?

Langley “I do not think O or anyone else in Hawaii ever considered him Hapa.
He would have been thought of as Popolo.”

I was trying to be nice. Hapa has no derogatory connotations anymore, whereas popolo might in some circles.

By all means tell us about Neil’s parties! He was pretty much the U.H. neighborhood communist back in the day.
I used to surf with John Kelly Jr. also a well known lefty, but never paid any attention to his politics – I was much more interested in his board designs and his daughters.

Thanks for the kind words. I can afford a new computer. It’s just the miser in me that keeps me from going down to the store and walking away with one. But more than the miser, I think, it is the ghost of the six inch Ricoh slide rule man that stands in the way. It’s the old habit of buying just enough equipment to do the job or maybe even a little less and stretching it.

I realized it was a form of vanity. The kind of vanity that makes you want to drive an older car just to let people know you can play “Ode to Joy” on a comb and a piece of plastic. it’s the old rebel in me that refuses to die when he should long ago have hung up his irons from lumbago. When you come right down to it, I love my rotten HP Pavilion.

But my wife keeps me honest and alerted me to the subtle vaingloriousness of it all. I am a snob, she says, in a reverse kind of way. What keeps me from getting the shiny new laptops is that that I feel it doesn’t go with the rest. But Confucius says — she says — that the each man must accept the road appropriate to him. And it is an offense against nature not to act your station in life. That is not honest. That is not humility, she says, but a violation of the Way.

Well St. Paul said the same, “when I was a child I had the things of a child …” etc so there must be something in it. Now my place in life may not merit me the top end Macbook Air, but it is no longer the six inch Ricoh. The Way would have me split the difference. So by rights I should upgrade the HP Pavilion.

My problem is that it still works, and like the dog we’ve been talking about, is still loyally blinking up at me. Damn that Paviliion. Why won’t it just die? So in the end, against all logic, I probably won’t upgrade for a while, just because.

I’m the same age as OZero, and I grew up in the Chicago area. The first calculator I can recall seeing was in my high school trig class in 1978. One of the super-geeky students, whose parents were fairly well-to-do, bought one for her. She had to sit by a plug all the time, as the thing was not battery-operated.

That same year, I took a computer programming class. The “computer” was a little Burroughs gizmo that looked like an adding machine and printed out on paper adding-machine tape. It probably had 10 bytes of memory!

I was in 10th grade at Stuyvesant High School in New York in 1972-73, and the big ‘gotta have’ thing for the math and science kids that year in school was to have their own calculator, in most cases, the Texas Instruments TI 2500 which was still pricey, but something parents of kids looking to go to Ivy League and other major colleges could still spring for without busting their budgets. Before that point, no one was using anything other than slide rules in even science high schools to do higher math calculations.

If they weren’t at Stuyvesant before 1972, they weren’t going to be at Barack Obama’s fifth grade class in elementary school. And there was a kid in 12th grade at Stuyvesant back in 1972-73 who could confirm that. Name’s David Axelrod — maybe the president could ring him up about the subject.

Somebody in my family must’ve used a slide rule, once upon a time, because I remember finding one (plastic cheapie) while scrounging in the kitchen odds & ends drawer as a kid.

And my oldest sister had a TI calculator in high school.

One of the first calculations I did while noodling around on it was the SHELLOIL joke. Learned that one in Scouts. Yup. Ranks right up there with, “Good afternoon, ma’am. Is your refrigerator running?”

The Obama administration along with bill ayers are of a group of people who make shit up as they go along, never understanding that people now can see what’s real and what’s bullshit.
That’s why Obama was booed in Boston, folks have discovered he is full of shit.

One can find hip-hop and such precursors of rap in the 1970s. In any event, the question is irrelevant to the passages I quoted. The passages I quoted from Dreams came not from 1975, but from Obama’s time as a community organizer in Chicago, which would date them from 1985-88. [Of course, this assumes the conversations actually took place.] In the mid 1980s, the time of the conversations, there were “rap artists.”